MJ

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted August 30, 2001 07:03 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #2 ******************* Some of my readers are disappointed, even angry, when I refuse to join the chorus of our sermonizers and speechifiers in order to make it unanimous. It doesn’t even occur to them how ridiculous, not to say absurd, their position is. Unanimity among us is like Mark Twain’s weather. Everyone talks about it but nobody does a damn thing – nobody, especially those who are in a position to do something…such as bishops. Why do we need two bishops within the same city and neighborhood? The answer must be obvious: if we needed only one, the other one will have to be discarded, or even worse, be relegated to number two position; and in case you didn’t know, number two is the most hated number among Armenians, especially those who have achieved number one status. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted June 24, 2001 08:29 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOME THOUGHTS ON CORRUPTION ******************************************* Democracy also means freedom from want. What we have in our homeland today is not democracy but the tyranny of destitution. Corruption is like cancer, and charity is worse than a band-aide treatment because it does nothing but entrench the power of the corrupt thus legitimizing criminal conduct. Instead of being feted and honored, political leaders from the Homeland should be mercilessly booed for their acceptance of corruption as an inevitable fact of life that only time can cure. It is a fundamental human right to live and work in an environment free of corruption. What could be more degrading for a man than the inability to provide for his family? What could be more oppressive than the fascism of unemployment and poverty without a single scintilla of hope on the horizon? Charity may make the Diaspora feel good but it is not, it cannot be, a substitute for social justice. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 02, 2001 06:44 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WAR AND PEACE ******************************** Some Armenian counter-arguments are more like allergic reactions. They have nothing to do with reason and everything to do with pathology. And that may well be the root of all our conflicts. If so far we have failed again and again to develop a consensus it’s because, unlike conflicting interests which may be reconciled, conflicting pathologies cannot. What do people want? Peace and prosperity. What do political leaders want? Power. They want power even if it means war and massacre. Lust for power recognizes no national or tribal barriers. Our leaders want power even if means the slow but systematic alienation, exodus and assimilation of the majority. In what way are they different from our enemies? And if you think of this forum as a microcosm: in what way are we different from our leaders? -------------------- ara baliozian

Ara Baloizian Member Member # 271 posted August 13, 2001 07:08 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JACKASSES, LEND ME YOUR EARS **************************************** When I express an honest opinion and an honest man agrees with me, I feel good; but when a dishonest man disagrees with me, I feel better. Why should I care to have the agreement of a dishonest man? I am sure, if I were to write like an ape or a jackass, I would have the agreement of apes and jackasses. And if I were to parrot the views of a boss, bishop, or benedefacator, I would have their agreement too... not to say the support of their hangers-on, hirelings and yes-men. Like all nations around the world we too have our share of fools and dupes who have not yet acquired the skill to think for themselves; also bloodsuckers and parasites who praise the nation publicly and bury it privately. On the day I have their agreement, I shall consider myself on the way to the devil. -------------------- [/b]ara baliozian[/b]

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted August 03, 2001 11:17 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE FLY AND THE HATCHET *********************************** "Do not remove a fly from your friend’s forehead with a hatchet." Chinese proverb I am read by readers who find me unreadable. I am hated by Armenians who tell me Armenians are loving people. I am called a jerk by individuals who consider themselves noble specimens of humanity. I am torn to shreds by chauvinists who tell me I should be more constructive. I am called the son of a whore by individuals who have assessed themselves as paragons of virtue. I am told to go to hell by born-again Christians. If anyone were to ask me now: "What is the most terrible curse you can think of?" I would reply: "May your offspring choose Armenian literature as a career!" -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted August 27, 2001 07:35 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ON PATRIOTISM AND OTHER CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY ************************************ Patriotism may well be abolished on the day an enlightened mankind catalogues all the crimes that have been committed in its name. If anyone ever dares to criticize one of our benefactors, an entire army of brown-nosers, parasites, hangers-on, flunkies and yes-man rise to his defense. But if a dissident is silenced, it’s like a tree that falls in the middle of nowhere. You want to see me silenced? Stop reading me and as far as you are concerned, I shall have been silenced. But if you think I am a bad influence on the next generation, consider the verbal crap that our political parties dish out daily in our schools and media thus legitimizing and reinforcing the persistence of our fragmentation and tribalism. The distance between a man you know from a distance and a man you know close-up, may be equal to the distance that exists between an ordinary Joe and Jack the Ripper. There are three ways to get to know a man well: to marry him (if you happen to be of the opposite sex, though that is no longer a necessary condition), to have a fight with him, or to work for him. Likewise, the best way to understand a country is to make a living in it. The rest is tourist patriotism. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 09, 2001 06:52 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DEFINITIONS *************************** FREEDOM OF SPEECH: One way to define it is by saying, even the ablest statesman is not authorized to tell even the worst scribbler what to write and how to write it. COMMISSAR OF CULTURE: Anyone, including a functional illiterate skinhead, who feels fully qualified to tell a writer what and how to write. QUESTIONS / ANSWERS What have our statesmen contributed to our collective existence? Commissar of culture. What have our commissars of culture contributed? Censorship and propaganda; also lies and death. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted August 29, 2001 12:14 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE REST IS SILENCE ******************************** For many years I couldn’t understand Armenians who avoided their fellow Armenians; Armenians who in the presence of fellow Armenians pretended to be odars; Armenians who stayed away from Armenian community centers and churches as if these were serpent pits. But now in my old age I find myself in the same position. To hear Armenian spoken in a supermarket is no longer a pleasant surprise. Neither is answering the phone and hearing someone identify himself as an Armenian. More and more often now I find myself blocking e-mail messages from fellow Armenians who use their phony patriotism to verbally abuse and insult anyone who refuses to echo their sentiments and thoughts; Armenians who demand to be judged by their opinion of themselves; Armenians who are so thoroughly Ottomanized that they confuse Armenianism with Ottomanism; in short, Armenians who remind me of Zarian’s dictum, "An Armenian’s tongue can be sharper than a Turk’s yataghan." -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted April 19, 2001 11:57 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2100 AD **************************** Here is the plot of a sci-fi novel that I may never write. On 2100 AD extra-terrestrials land on Earth and they speak Armenian. The explanation for this strange phenomenon is as follows: they come from a distant planet that is an exact replica of our own but with a different history. On that planet (Earth Armenia has become the mightiest and the most technologically advanced empire because at one point in their career as a nation Armenians decided to do the right thing. Dikran the Great named as his minister of war a competent military leader familiar with Roman strategy, strength, and style of combat and was thus successful in defeating and expelling the Romans from the Middle East permanently. The Mamikonians, Bagratunis, and Ardzrunis decided to place the interests of the nation above their own dynastic ambitions by uniting under a single ruler. Instead of blinding and assassinating one another, Armenian emperors, usurpers, and generals of the Byzantine Empire decided to cooperate with one another and to adopt a pro-Armenian foreign policy. Moral: The so-called invisible historic forces beyond human control are figments of our imagination and they are no match for man-made policies by leaders with vision. A FRIENDLY CRITIC ******************************* "No one takes short essays seriously," a friend (himself a writer) tells me. "You should write long ones with footnotes and scholarly paraphernalia. That’s where the money is. That’s when your readers will sit up and say, Aha! This fellow is up to something!" But I don’t see why I should produce twenty pages to say what may be said in two brief paragraphs or sentences. Between the long and the short version, the shortest has a better chance to be read, understood and appreciated if only because it does not make any demands on the reader’s time; and if it bores, it bores only for a few seconds. Schubert wrote miniature songs and Wagner wrote long-winded operas; Chekhov wrote short stories and Tolstoy big baggy novels. So what if I write postage-stamp essays? I am not saying I belong to the Schubert/Chekhov tradition; I am only saying the genre and length don’t matter; the contents do. If what I say is right, it’s bound to penetrate the thickest skull; but if what I say is wrong, even if I say it in an 800-page tome it will still be wrong. His answer: "Schubert is German and Chekhov Russian. We are Armenian; we are different!" And I cannot help reflecting: Armenianism has become such a convenient explanation for every conceivable theory and such a patriotic justification for every misconception! -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted April 18, 2001 12:17 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE DEVIL AND THE GOOD LORD ************************************ Our chauvinists and partisan propagandists have a long list of historical, geographical, cultural, political and economic reasons behind every one of our failures, defeats and catastrophes; and when they run out of them, they evoke human nature -- their message being: We are beyond criticism because we are what God, in his infinite wisdom, has made us. Criticism is a waste of time and critics useless because no one has the power to unmake what God has wrought. The fallacy in this line of sophistry consists in confusing what is human with what is subhuman. Ignorance, arrogance and stupidity are not human but subhuman; so are intolerance and greed; and so are deception, lies and propaganda. There is a difference between human nature and subhuman nature. We must extol the first and suppress the second; and if we cannot suppress it, we must call it by its right name. To ascribe the devil’s actions to God is blasphemy. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted August 02, 2001 06:54 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- KILLERS ************************ I don’t write for the living but for the dead, and I speak in the name of all those writers who were silenced by commissars: Soviet commissars with a license to kill, diasporan commissars (not all of them members of the ADL or ARF) whose words were "sharper than a Turk’s yataghan" (Zarian), and readers who killed with their apathy: the kind of apathy whose message is: "We don’t need you because we know better," or "We have no use for you because we find you depressing," or again "We wish to be entertained and flattered not criticized and exposed for what we really are: murderers of writers and killers of dreams." -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 31, 2001 06:53 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- REFLECTIONS ******************************** There are those who use Armenianism as a license to behave like swine and to demand unconditional love at the same time – all in the name of patriotism, of course. Lovable people don’t ask for love (they have enough of it); neither do the hateful (they know they don’t deserve it); it is different with the spoiled and the loathsome…. The easiest and surest victim of deception is the deceiver himself. It is impossible to carry on a civilized conversation with someone who cannot tell the difference between an honest statement and recycled crap. There are two kinds of Armenians: those who aspire to expose the deceivers and those whose ambition is to become one of them; and the second kind outnumber the first because there is more money in it – also power and prestige. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 29, 2001 07:42 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE SHORTEST SERMON IN THE WORLD ******************************************** What’s the ideal length of a sermon? If it’s bad, the shorter the better. What makes a sermon bad? If you are a phony or a dupe of phonies, any sermon in praise of honesty. And here is the shortest sermon you will ever hear: We are all born, live and die with one significant difference: at the hour of our death when we look back at our lives some of us will say: we tried to live and honest life. It wasn’t easy and we failed again and again but we never gave up trying. The others will only wish they could say as much. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted August 15, 2001 11:18 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TO A PROUD ARMENIAN ******************************* Scratch a proud armenian and expose the chauvinist. Scratch a chauvinist and expose the commissar. Scratch a commissar and expose the killer. Signed yours truly, a humble armenian who no matter how hard he tries he cannot be proud of the fact that for nearly a millennium we were oppressed, brutalized, and ottomanized by the turks; our boys shed their blood for their sultans and our girls serviced their elite as concubines; no matter how hard I try I cannot be proud of the fact that we were the first nation to suffer a genocide in the 20th century; neither can I be proud that we suffered successive waves of purges in the USSR (and, in both instances, with the full cooperation of Armenian traitors). no matter how hard I try I cannot be proud of the fact that as our benedefecators lose thousands of dollars in a matter of seconds in Las Vegas and throw million-dollar banquets in honor of this or that rascal thousands of girls in the homeland engage in prostitution to feed their families; and how can I be proud of the fact that instead of working together our political organization work against one another and we remain as divided today as we were in the middle ages under the Mamigonians, Bagratunism, Ardzrunies and the devil know how many other two-bit warlords with dynastic ambitions…. Scratch a proud of armenian and expose an ignoramus infatuated with his own ignorance. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 11, 2001 06:52 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ON JUSTICE **************************** At no time in our history we have had an independent judiciary. Which means that the executive branch or those who make and implement policies have done so without any checks and balances. History tells us – and on this point it is as clear as daylight – whenever that happens -- and it invariably happens in authoritarian and totalitarian power structures -- the executive branch corrupts, controls and prostitutes the judiciary branch, with the result that justice as such becomes obsolete and irrelevant especially when it applies to the executive branch. Which is why we are a nation of a thousand Watergates and as many Monica Lewinskys. All power structures – from the most advanced democracies to the most ruthless fascist states – generate a lunatic fringe, with one significant difference: under fascist power structures, the lunatic fringe has a far better chance to rise to the top and it never fails to do so. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 05, 2001 07:15 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIMPLIFICATIONS ************************ Between an unjust democracy and a just despotism I will always be on the side of democracy because I can always rely on its checks and balances and free play of conflicting interests to restore a semblance of justice; whereas justice under a despotism (assuming such a thing has ever existed or will ever exist) is bound to be an ephemeral and unpredictable luxury that may vanish without warning at the caprice of a single individual accountable to none. America is America because it knows how to take care of its own. Armenia is Armenia because it doesn’t. I began my career as a shameless chauvinist until I met a poet I had praised. I have committed many major blunders in my life but these two (praising him and going out of my way to meet him) I rank among the top ten. Since then I have discovered Armenian poets to be the least poetic of creatures. I see more poetry in a spider’s web and even in a dung beetle’s ball of dung. The average Armenian is carefully indoctrinated by our educational system to be a spin doctor and a cover-up artist on the grounds that it is anti-Armenian to exhibit our dirty linen in public. Result: our crooks go about their business unmolested. The average Armenian knows that if caught shoplifting – even if the item is worth pennies – he may be arrested and punished; but he demands that our crooks remain unexposed. We are expected to believe that a corrupt boss or bishop has a legal option that is not available to ordinary mortals: he may plead not guilty on grounds of Armenianism. Or, in the words of one of my readers: "A fornicating bishop who embezzles millions is also a man of God." -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 04, 2001 07:05 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PALESTINIANS / JEWS ARMENIANS / TURKS ************************************ There are many parallels and as many unlearned lessons here. But first, let me warn the reader that I am not here to defend Jews, Turks, and Americans. They can take care of their own. Besides, I am too busy with our own crap to shovel someone else’s. Only one fellow in ten thousand understands the complexities of Middle-Eastern politics and we meet him every day. Why is it that people who sympathize with the Palestinians because (they say) they have been victimized by the Jews for fifty years have no room for sympathy for the Jews who have been victimized by the world for five thousand years? I remember, when I pointed this out to an Armenian lady from Iraq, she replied: "The Jews have been victimized because everyone hates them, and they are hated because they deserve to be!" Hatred has no place in politics -- hatred, blood feuds, vendettas, grudges and emotions in general tend to backfire because they make one blind. If you have ever confronted someone who hates you, you know that it is impossible to reason and to come to terms with him. That’s because hatred is an insatiable monster. It demands the total annihilation of the enemy. I was brought up to hate the Turks: one reason why I would never negotiate with them. Instead I would ask a third party and a total outsider to represent me. If peace is ever established in the Middle East it will be because of negotiators without grudges and scores to settle. But as long as there are Palestinians, Jews, Armenians and Turks who think of themselves as victims, there will be no light at the end of the tunnel. The Jews think they have been victimized by the world. The Palestinians think they have been victimized by the Jews and the Americans. The Turks think they have been victimized by the great powers of Europe and Russia from without and from within by Greeks, Kurds, and Armenians…. War-makers are driven by blind emotion; peace-makers by objective compromisers. In war one side is bound to lose more than the other. In peace both sides are bound to profit. Now, let us pray…. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 05, 2001 12:39 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PARA/NOIA ********************** At one time or another I have been accused of being in the pay of Tashnaks, Ramgavars, the CIA, the Vatican, Turkey, Israel, Canada, and the devil knows who else…all because I expressed views that my accusers didn’t like. I must be a wealthy man with all that money pouring in from all four corners of the globe. And if what they say is right – "If you know how much money you have, you can’t be very wealthy!" – I must be very wealthy indeed! A UTOPIAN PROPOSAL ******************************************** I just finished reading a commentary by one of our pundits in which he suggests, among other things, that our institutions should support dissenters, critics, and satirists who may be potential Voltaires and Baronians. I consider this to be a wonderful idea, but also a thoroughly utopian proposal because it amounts to asking Stalin to support Solzhenitsyn and the Ayatollah Khomeini to read (please note, I am not saying to support) Salman Rushdie. In some other realm that may happen indeed, but not in this one. In my encounters and conversations with Armenian writers and artists (and I don’t mean dissenters and satirists: do we have them?) the consensus is: they no longer expect institutional support; they will be more than happy if our institutions refrained from raising obstacles in their paths. SUMMING UP ************************************* When it comes to understanding and solving our problems, we have two schools of thought: those who put all the blame on others (Turks, the West, Soviets, etc.), and those who ascribe them [our problems] to our own failings (intolerance, tribalism, lack of vision, incompetence, corruption, authoritarianism, misguided patriotism, etc.) The unspoken slogan of the first school is: "We are in good hands." The unspoken slogan of the second school is: "Throw the rascals out!" You may now guess which of these two schools is favored by our lobotomized leadership. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 02, 2001 10:53 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A+ FOR EFFORT *************************** No matter how absurd a notion, you will invariably find a self-appointed Armenian pundit who subscribes to it. I was brought up (make it, brainwashed) to believe Armenians are just about the smartest people on earth. Ever since then my view of my fellow countrymen has been going steadily downhill. We may not be just about the dumbest people on earth, but we are on our way there. We deserve at least A+ for effort. To be dumb is of course no crime; what makes it so is the arrogance that goes with it – an arrogance so outrageous that must be a transparent mask of abysmal insecurity. FIGURE THAT ONE OUT IF YOU CAN ************************************** After I told him I don’t like to travel, a fellow Armenian sent me a ticket for a round trip to Washington, DC. And after publishing several essays in which I expressed my loathing of all partisan politics, a Ramgavar boss commissioned me to write biographical sketches of Ramgavar leaders; and when I told him I didn’t even know the names of these leaders, he went around saying: "We offered to support him but he insulted us!" THREE OBSTACLES *************************** As an Armenian writer, I confront two major obstacles: (one) I am Armenian, and (two) I am a writer. Nothing new in that. I was warned of both when I was a little boy. But no one knew enough to warn me of a third and a far more formidable obstacle, namely, I would be writing for an audience of experts on any given subject. There are times when I feel as though I were a mentally challenged freshman writing for an audience of hostile professors with degrees on theology,* literary criticism,** and political science.*** ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ *From the University of Josif Stalin in Moscow. **From the Ayatollah Khomeini Institute of Higher Learning in Teheran. ***From the University of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted June 29, 2001 06:50 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SYNONYMOUS STATEMENTS ********************************* Thou shalt not recycle fascist propaganda. Thou shalt not spread lies. Thou shalt not believe in liars. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not worship idols. Thou shalt not abdicate you reason and parrot nonsense as if it were gospel truth. Thou shalt not make your views dependent on your wishes. ONE-UPMANSHIP ************************ "I have been to Armenia four times!" a reader writes, thus implying, if I have been there only three times I am a lesser Armenian, and if I have never been there, I don’t even qualify as the scum of the earth. PARANOIA ******************** Another reader accuses me of being an enemy agent and a hireling of the Canadian government, thus implying Canada harbors hostile or even imperialist ambitions against our beloved homeland. And I imagine the following scenario: this reader and I live in Stalin’s USSR. What would happen next? I would be shot and he would be promoted…until he too would be accused of being a foreign agent. There are no happy endings under fascism. HYPERBOLE *********************** "Everyone hates you!" a reader writes. No, not quite. Only those I have criticized. Not every Armenian is a fool, a fanatic, or a fascist. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted June 22, 2001 06:49 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FEAR OF REPETITION ******************************* In an effort to silence me, some of my hostile readers tell me I have become a broken record…which means they keep reading me…how else would they know that I repeat myself? Next question: Why would anyone go on reading "a broken record?" I am reminded of Nixon and his cronies during the Watergate scandals: they too kept saying and repeating, "The American people have had enough of Watergate!" But the American people and the media had had enough of Watergate only after Nixon was forced to resign and his cronies were arrested, tried, found guilty and imprisoned like common criminals. ARE WE UNIQUE? ************************** Uniqueness is the most common feature of all beings and things – from individuals, tribes, nations and races to grains of sand, blades of grass and flakes of snow. To say that since we are unique we are also better is not just nonsense, but dangerous nonsense – and dangerous because it promotes racism, arrogance, and self-satisfied moronism. The paradox here is that those who say they are better are as a rule the worst scum on earth. ON ARROGANCE **************************************** Massacres happen because one side underestimates the ruthless determination and savagery of the opposition. Let us expose the guilt of the criminals by all means, but let us not ignore the arrogance of those who overestimated their own invulnerability. Likewise, assimilation (or white massacre) happens because our dominant minority underestimates the seductive powers of alien cultures and overestimates the irresistible charms of Armenianism. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted August 14, 2001 06:58 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OUR SITUATION ******************** When members of the ADL tell me the ARF can do nothing right; when members of the ARF assert they do nothing wrong; when the ADL-controlled AGBU maintains to be a non-partisan organization; when the Armenian Assembly feels qualified to represent Armenians of the Diaspora; and when all the other organizations dismiss that claim as arrogant nonsense, one may be justified in suspecting that, when it comes to assessing their own performance and the performance of the opposition, honesty, objectivity and truth fly out the window. Strike that! To say they fly out the window is to imply they were there to begin with. They were never there, and it looks like they are destined to remain unwelcome guests and perennial exiles. When our partisans treat one another as charlatans and worse, why should anyone take them seriously? If they relegate one another to irrelevance, can’t they see that they too become irrelevant in the eyes of the world? Can’t they see that in killing one another they are committing suicide, and worse, much worse: they are committing genosuicide? -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted June 04, 2001 11:53 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITICS 101 **************************** "A bourgeois is a bourgeois regardless of national origin," stated Lenin. And so it is! The same could be said of lust for power. Politics is the pursuit of power. Literature is the pursuit of truth. The two have been and are destined to be in constant conflict. The Turks exterminated an entire generation of our ablest intellectuals in 1915. Two decades later the Soviets did the same thing in Armenia. And if you think our own political leadership has been more tolerant, consider the manner in which some of our ablest men in the diaspora were silenced – among them Shahan Shahnour, Gostan Zarian, and Baruir Massikian. Our inability to solve our central problem (tribalism) has no other explanation. In the battle between power and truth, truth is bound to be the perennial loser, and with it, the integrity and ultimately the survival of our nation. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted August 23, 2001 07:02 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- REFLECTIONS ON HISTORY *********************************** Our version of Ottoman history is as important or relevant in the eyes of the world as the Afro-American or American- Indian version of American history. World history is an endless catalogue of unsettled scores: our score against the Turks is only one of them. There are no contradictions between Toynbee’s and Dadrian’s versions of our genocide, only differences in interpretation, context, perspective, and emphasis. By emphasizing our own perspective and ignoring all others we may end up damaging our case and reinforcing Turkish arguments. When it comes to a choice between our self-interest and the unsettled scores of, say, the Untouchables of India or the Tutsis (or is it the Hutus?) of Africa, we will invariably choose our self-interest. To think that other nations, being morally superior, will behave in a more altruistic manner when it comes to choosing between their own self-interest and siding with us against the Turks, is another symptom of our tendency to engage in egocentric illusions. -------------------- ara baliozian

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 11, 2001 10:59 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ARMENIANS ON ARMENIANS ************************************ Do you want to know more about Armenians? Read about Eskimos, Patagonians, Hottentots…. Above all avoid reading Armenians on Armenians. Their views will be filtered, biased, distorted. Compare Hagop Baronian’s Armenians with Saroyan’s: they might as well be odars to one another. Baronian’s Armenians are rascals and fools, Saroyam’s cute and harmless. Saroyan himself was not exactly a Saroyanesque character, his son Aram tells us in his memoirs (LAST RITES). He was more of a character straight out of Dostoevsky. Not that I trust Aram’s views. He too was biased -- motivated as he was by bitterness and resentment; he did not inherit any of his father’s assets (over a million dollars, if memory serves). Please note that I am not myself personally acquainted with Aram, but judging by his books (or the one or two that I have read) he did not deserve a penny. Again, please, don’t take my word for it. I too plead bias. -------------------- ara baliozian